Myths vs Facts of Call Center Outsourcing

03/06/2018

5 Call Center Outsourcing Myths Dispelled

You’ve never outsourced your call center operations. As a business leader, you might have reservations.

That’s understandable. There’s a lot at stake, such as your company’s reputation for great sales support and customer service.

After 22 years of providing on-demand contact center solutions, we know the concerns. Heard the myths versus facts about outsourcing services from big businesses, mid-sized companies and franchised operations.

Here are ones that often come up—and how we address them.

Myth: An outsourcer won’t deliver the same brand experience with consistent service.

Fact: For a provider to be of value, its customer service agents must be an extension of a client’s brand. A customer shouldn’t discern the difference between dealing with an employee or an agent. Such consistency requires agents to be immersed in the business.

To achieve it, Working Solutions agents are educated in a company’s beliefs and brand voice. They role-play, engaging customer personas in different situations. In short, agents become the brand, personifying an organization’s values in every interaction—be it voice, chat or text.

Myth: Our business is hard to understand and too complex to outsource call center operations.

Fact: Granted, companies can be complicated. Whatever the size, certified educators from Working Solutions University first become students of their businesses. They spend the time needed to fully understand the client’s business. Educators seek to understand the operations firsthand.

Afterward, a custom curriculum is developed. Educator-led instruction then follows with agents. It could take a day or two, a week, and in some cases, more than a month to learn the business. It all depends on requirements and expectations. That investment upfront pays big dividends later in improved performance and higher satisfaction scores.

Fact: Let’s begin with a few questions. Could your in-house operations—perhaps short-funded and understaffed—actually be less secure than a professional service provider’s? When was your last compliance audit? Did it assess the Big Three: agent trustworthiness, infrastructure security and data protection?

Anything less than a hard-edged, holistic approach leaves your operations wide open to system breaches and customers to personal-identity thefts. Billy West, head of Working Solutions IT operations, sums up being fail-safe in four words: Start smart. End secure.

A case in point: A hospitality client, which was using an offshore provider for some work, asked us if on-demand, onshore services could deliver better value. After analyzing call volume, we calculated the same work could be done in the U.S.—with 29% fewer full-time equivalents. Also, productive agents translated into more utilization per hour, a 42% increase over of offshore vendors.

Myth: Performance would decline, and metrics won’t be met if we outsource call center operations.

Fact: What gets measured gets managed. That’s why key performance indicators-from average handle times to cross-sales-are industry-specific to ensure client success. Working Solutions has served 100s of clients across diverse businesses, from finance to retail to travel. We know how exacting metrics need to be.

For instance: Over a five-month period, a major energy company underestimated demand by 20%. Not only did the client need a fast-flex workforce to step in, but it also wanted agents to achieve a 92% productivity rate. That meant only six minutes of idle time per hour. We helped recover nearly 90% of the unexpected demand. Plus, agents exceeded performance of the client’s internal team by more than 10%.